Tourism

The first large cruise ship in nearly two years arrived in Alaska at the end of July. It marks the return of the region’s biggest source of tourism, once a multimillion-dollar industry that fueled tens of thousands of local jobs.

In the remote village of Hoonah, tourism at the Native corporation-owned Icy Strait Point destination fuels the economy. The community is vaccinated, masked, and ready to make up for a lost season — even as case counts rise dramatically statewide.

At 5:00, the sun is still high in the sky when the Serenade of the Seas sails into port at Icy Strait Point in Hoonah. Local dancers and singers wait at the top of the dock as a shore crew scurries to secure the thousand-foot vessel.

It’s a late start to the season, but one that marks an end to nearly two years of industry standstill for the state — a hiatus that cost an estimated $3 billion and more than 40,000 jobs in Alaska alone. Those losses are concentrated in Southeast Alaska, where cruising is about the easiest way to get large numbers of tourists to destinations off the road system.

George Dalton Jr. is one of the dancers. He wears his regalia, a white fur headpiece that shifts as the wind picks up and a felt cape lined with buttons and a moon beaded on his back.

“I’m telling you my heart is pounding right now, with watching this ship tie up,” he said.

Last year was supposed to be the biggest cruise season yet.

“I was really missing it big time,” Dalton said.

When the cruise season was canceled in 2020, he had to put plans to buy a new engine for his boat on hold. He’s one of about 100 employees hired back this season, only about a third of the full workforce.

This ship is carrying well under half of its usual passengers — fewer than 1,000 people — but that’s enough to nearly double the population of Hoonah for the hours it’s in port.

Drums pick up as passengers disgorge from the ship onto the dock. Some walk up the boardwalks towards food and souvenirs, others line up for sightseeing tours.

“It’s been just like a regular cruise other than you just have to wear a mask,” said Karen MacMillan from Clinton, Mississippi. She says there are perks to cruising in a pandemic; there are no lines for activities on the boat. Crew members outnumber the passengers.

She has been to Alaska before, but her grandkids — among the tiny minority of unvaccinated passengers on the ship — are seeing it for the first time.

Her granddaughter Harper is almost 9 years old. She wears pink sparkles above her eyes and wears a green and white polka dot mask. It’s required indoors and out.

She deemed Alaska “awesome.” And the mask?

“It feels good when you’re standing outside, but when you’re standing inside you just want to take it off,” she said.

The kids won’t be able to go into the town of Hoonah, since only vaccinated people are allowed, but they do get to go on a whale watching tour.

Health precautions on the boat are dialed in tight. Anyone over 12 years old must be vaccinated. Icy Strait Point requires masks indoors regardless of vaccination status. And in Hoonah, a remote, largely Tlingit community of around 800 people, there are rules too. Unvaccinated visitors must quarantine or produce negative test results. That’s because there’s a local health clinic there, but no hospital. There have been only about 30 cases of COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic between Hoonah and its neighboring village of Angoon.

It’s a good track record, and officials hope to keep it that way, even as Alaska is among the states with the fastest rising case counts.

“Still happy to see ‘em, I just keep my distance from the ones that ain’t wearing the mask. Six feet away,” said Myrtle Brogdon Sharclane, as she walked against the tourist traffic towards the vessel with her brother.

They had to show their vaccination cards to come out to the docks from town. She’s from Hoonah, but visiting from Seattle. She scans the tourists walking up the dock.

“They just came from Sitka. There’s a hundred people there that have the COVID. I just heard on the news this morning. I don’t care if they don’t wear it, but we’ve got to protect ourselves,” she said.

Sharclane is a shareholder in the Native corporation that owns Icy Strait Point, so her pocketbook was hit when the cruise season was canceled last year.

She says she’s excited to see cruises back and she’s worried about COVID-19. Her mask is loose at one corner and her brother offers her a fresh one.

“I think personally that they moved too fast. And it’s all striking us hard again,” she said.

It’s taken a lot of effort to get to this moment. Congress passed a special waiver to allow cruise ships to bypass Canada’s closed port this summer. The cruise industry had to implement protocols and open up bookings in record time.

“It’s never easy, but it’s an honor to be the first ship and we’re happy to be the first ship,” said Mark Tamis, a senior vice president with Royal Caribbean.

His mask covers a smile as he surveys tourists shopping and eating crab legs in the sun.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put the Serenade of the Seas on a yellow alert the morning the cruise arrived. Tamis says that alert is part of the new normal. It’s raised when a passenger exhibits any symptoms at all until a negative Covid test comes through. He says there are no COVID cases on the ship. The alert went down to green the next morning.

“We’re in great shape. It’s just part of the normal protocols that the CDC has when they’re just, you know, overall regulating and making sure that we come back in a very safe, a very moderated way,” he said.

Hoonah looks like what the brochures promise. Thick spruce trees cascade down the mountainside to blue water, where salmon jump. Bright pink fireweed blooms on the beach and the first thimbleberries are ripening on the sunny side of the boardwalks.

Even locals stop and turn when the sun catches on the slick black fin of an orca that pops up twice before it’s gone.

Seven fully vaccinated people aboard a small cruise ship that docked in Ketchikan over the weekend have tested positive for COVID-19. The ship’s operator UnCruise canceled a sailing over this past weekend in response.

The 74-passenger Wilderness Explorer sailed to Juneau from Ketchikan Monday evening.

UnCruise spokesperson Liz Galloway said in a statement the four positive passengers would isolate in a Juneau hotel. Three positive crew members would isolate aboard the vessel, she said.

Assistant Juneau city manager Robert Barr said city officials have been coordinating with the operator.

“We’ve been working with UnCruise to make sure all that isolation is happening per public health guidance to make sure that the case activities stays contained to those individuals until they’re done with their isolation period,” he said.

Juneau officials say the risk to the community is minimal.

Ketchikan’s port director, Mark Hilson, said in a statement Monday evening that to his knowledge, the COVID-19 positive individuals stayed aboard while the ship docked in Ketchikan. But he says the remainder of the passengers “disembarked as was originally planned.”

Galloway, the UnCruise spokesperson, declined to say how many people aboard had been identified as close contacts and whether they were in quarantine. She said the company was working with a definition of close contact provided by local health officials and noted that the protocols for vaccinated people differ from those for unvaccinated people.

She said the operator identified the seven positive cases “starting July 23.”

The company says it’s the first time a fully vaccinated guest has tested positive for the disease on its ships.

Barr says that despite the positive tests, the three authorized COVID-19 vaccines are thought to be highly effective at preventing severe cases of the disease.

“The vaccine is very, very good at keeping people out of the hospital and keeping people from dying and getting seriously sick,” he said. “It’s not an iron-clad shield, it won’t necessarily completely prevent you from getting any version of the illness. But it does a very good job at keeping you from getting seriously sick.”

In a statement, UnCruise owner and CEO Dan Blanchard says the seven positive individuals had mild, cold-like symptoms. The company says it’s testing all symptomatic passengers and crew and working with local and state health officials to respond to COVID-19 cases, noting that its decision to cancel this weekend’s cruise was voluntary and not prompted by Coast Guard or health agency requirements. Small cruise vessels, including the entire UnCruise fleet, are not required to comply with federal pandemic rules that apply to larger ships.

In its statement, UnCruise speculates that the Delta variant is behind the cases. Barr says it’s a fair assumption, but lab testing has not confirmed the variant’s presence on the Explorer.

Juneau officials reported one case each on two additional cruise ships Monday: one aboard a large ship, the Celebrity Millennium, and the other on another small ship, the American Constellation. That ship already had an outbreak of 16 passengers on an earlier sailing this season.

This story has been updated with additional information and comments from an UnCruise spokesperson and Ketchikan’s port director.

A City and Borough of Juneau official confirmed on Monday that one vaccinated person from the cruise ship Celebrity Millennium was found to be infected with COVID-19 over the weekend. The ship is in port in Juneau and is scheduled to be in Skagway Tuesday morning.

Deputy city manager Robert Barr says the individual did not circulate in Juneau as a tourist, but will leave the capital city by air ambulance. The city is working with the cruise lines and the state’s health department to respond.

“I think that we were never expecting the cruise season to be entirely COVID free,” Barr said. “Because even though the cruise ships are highly vaccinated, we again know that vaccines are not perfect, and that they will rely on herd immunity.”

Barr says vaccines are nonetheless the most effective way to combat the spread of the virus. He said he’s heartened that nearly 80% of Juneau’s eligible population has now had a first shot.

There will be no immediate changes to the city’s health guidelines. Barr says there is no hard and fast threshold where Juneau would restrict ships into port, but does plan to examine that question on a case-by-case basis.

Barr says he is confident in the city’s partnership with the cruise industry and state health department to ensure a safe season despite occasional cases.

The first large cruise ship to dock in Juneau since 2019 arrived Friday morning. Juneau residents have mixed feelings about the ship’s arrival amid an uptick in COVID-19 cases.

But, for the most part, the feeling at the dock and inside downtown businesses on Friday was one of hope. 

Royal Caribbean’s Serenade of the Seas arrived around 7 a.m. carrying less than 650 guests and a little more than 800 crew members. 

In a non-pandemic era, the vessel has room for more than 2,400 passengers, but it’s traveling at a reduced capacity.

Russ and Kacy Radigan walked off the ship around 10 a.m. Traveling from Columbus, Ohio this was their first time in Alaska and a long-awaited trip.

“We planned this Alaska cruise like two years ago before the pandemic happened and it kept on getting canceled and canceled,” Russ said. “This was the first Alaska cruise opportunity that we had [since then], so we decided to take it.”

The Radigans were on their way to see the Mendenhall Glacier and they’ve already been on several whale watches and other wildlife excursions. 

“We saw a number of whales, a number of seals and a number of otters and you know, we thought maybe we’d see one or two,” he said. “I think they were waiting for us.”

Jeremy Schroeder was also aboard the Serenade of the Seas. He said despite the circumstances, he felt very safe aboard the ship and comfortable with the COVID-19 protocols that were in place.

“Most people [aboard the ship] are vaccinated,” Schroeder said. “Obviously the young ones aren’t, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by everybody still wearing their masks, even though we are all vaccinated.”

Schroeder said he and his family were planning to take a helicopter tour out to the glacier if the weather held. Of course, with safety protocols came a much quieter scene at the dock. People were just slowly trickling off the ship and the booths offering whale watching and other tours were less than half full. Greg Pilcher was manning one of the booths for M&M Tours.

“It’s pretty slow,” Pilcher said. “There’s not a whole lot of people on the ship, but I think we did better than expected. We wrote a couple tickets, which was great. I think we just wanted to get out here and like practice and remember how to do everything and it just feels really good that there are people here again because it’s been a long two years for sure.” 

Down the street, the Red Dog Saloon had just opened for the day and the employees weren’t wearing their usual street clothes. Red Dog waitress Emily Lange said the Red Dog is a different restaurant when the cruise ships come to town.

“This is my first day wearing the corset and the fun dress,” she said. “It’s more about the showmanship when the tourists come in. So we put on this getup and we’ll have live music and we’ll all sing along. I’m just excited for being busy all the time.”

Some cruise passengers made their way to the gift shops downtown, like The Bear’s Lair, where employee Kaysa Korpela said she’d already made some sales.

“There’s been a few customers coming through and I really appreciate that they’re mostly masked up,” Korpela said. “I think they got the word on the boat that it was respectful to do that and most of them have been very respectful and if they’re not masked they ask if they should be.”

She said the passengers seemed excited to be there and most were just wandering around before going on tours later in the day. Korpela said she’s glad to see travelers in the store again.

“But I’m glad that it’s starting slowly because I wouldn’t want to see like five boats in the harbor all at once,” she said. “This is a good introduction. I’ve worked in this business for about four or five years now. Sometimes it can be pretty hectic but today has been pretty easy to handle.”

After leaving Juneau, the Serenade of the Seas is scheduled to dock in Ketchikan before stopping in Sitka for a second time on Wednesday. Another ship will also be in port in Sitka that day.

On Thursday, cruise industry representatives visiting Juneau shared what to expect from this year’s short season and how cruise lines are handling COVID-19.

“It’s not going to look the same, but it sure does feel good to be back,” said Renée Reeve, vice president of government and community relations for Cruise Lines International Association Alaska. Its 17 member lines bring almost all of the cruise ship passengers to the state.

Reeve said there are nine big ships visiting Southeast Alaska this year, with 78 voyages planned. In 2019, there were 39 big ships with more than 500 voyages.

Passenger projections are fuzzy because cruise lines only got the regulatory green light in June. Booking time was limited, and the ships probably won’t sail at full capacity.

Reeve also discussed COVID-19.

“As we all know, our COVID numbers are rising across the state of Alaska right now,” Reeve said. “We at CLIA Alaska are committed to monitoring that with our member lines so that as the situation evolves, we can respond appropriately.”

She said most of the ships that will be in Alaska this season will have at least 95% of their passengers and crew vaccinated to meet a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention requirement to sail.

Royal Caribbean is the exception. It markets to families with children who aren’t eligible for COVID-19 vaccines. Its ships, including the Serenade of the Seas that’s sailing in Southeast Alaska now, will have lower vaccination rates. But they’ll also operate under stricter CDC requirements for things like masking, physical distancing and meal service.

Regardless of vaccination rates, CLIA Alaska has asked its lines to participate in weekly briefings with port communities on COVID-19.

“So, if your community decides that it’s time to bring masks back? We want them to know that before their ship comes to port so their passengers are aware of that,” Reeve said.

Lanie Downs is senior director of community relations and public affairs. She said surveys have shown that cruise ship passengers are seeking COVID-conscious policies.

“The passengers that are coming on the ships actually wanted to those, you know, the high vaccine rates,” Downs said. “They don’t mind mask wearing, they don’t mind social distancing. They’re prepared for that, and they understand it.”

Reeve and Downs spoke during the Greater Juneau Chamber of Commerce luncheon on Thursday.

Canada has published the list of requirements you’ll need to meet before you can get through the border.

Skagwegians have longed for the day they can drive over White Pass into Canada for about as long as the pandemic-related border restrictions have been in place. That day will finally come on Monday, Aug. 9.

Businesses in Carcross, the next town north in Canada’s Yukon Territory, are ready for Skagway traffic as well. Bonnie O’Conner, co-owner of Matthew Watson General Store in downtown Carcross, says they are open for business on the weekends, and additional traffic will be welcomed.

“You know, the shelves have been dusted off, and we’ve got stuff for sale, and, we’re ready,” O’Conner said.

To get into Canada, U.S. citizens will need a negative molecular COVID-19 test within 72 hours of reaching the border. In Skagway, the Dahl Memorial Clinic offers rapid testing free of charge, by appointment only. The Skagway Traditional Council offers free tests as well, but it may take multiple days to get the results.

In Haines, SEARHC offers a rapid test for $145. The sliding scale fee structure would apply to any SEARHC patients, and insurance companies may cover testing as well, but it’s best to check your individual policy.

People entering Canada for nonessential travel may be subjected to a random rapid test at the border, which could take 20-30 minutes.

After you have your testing complete, you’ll need to register with ArriveCAN. The app is a free download for smartphones through the Canada.ca website. It can also be accessed through a web portal. However, be wary of sites that ask for payment — there are several third-party hoax sites that charge money. ArriveCAN is free to use.

Finally, make sure you have all travel documents with you, including a passport and vaccination card. The Canadian customs agent will need to check those documents and your ArriveCAN status. The program will store your information and can be accessed offline after all information is uploaded.

ArriveCAN gives you a 72-hour window prior to arrival at the border to upload your information. Photos of both your passport and your vaccine card will be required.

Any forged vaccination records will be subject to a $750,000 fine and up to six months imprisonment under Canada’s Quarantine Act.

Only fully vaccinated travelers will be allowed to enter for nonessential travel. Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines all meet the requirements.

According to Canadian officials, tour operators will be allowed to bring groups into Canada if all group passengers meet the same regulations as individual passengers. But the logistics of getting everyone tested ahead of time seems daunting to local tour operator Billi Clem who owns Klondike Tours.

“I have no idea how we’re going to get all that testing done,” said Clem.

In order to be properly prepared, any cruise ship passengers that want to book a trip to Canada would need to test within 72 hours of arriving in Skagway, but there is no word yet if that can be done onboard the ships.

Re-entry for American citizens back into the United States will not change. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, all U.S. citizens that enter Canada will be welcomed back home to the United States upon return.

But vaccinated Canadians? They’ll be barred from crossing the U.S. border for nonessential travel until at least Aug. 21.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify the Canadian government’s new protocols are for people entering Canada for nonessential travel. People entering for essential travel, such as bringing goods or services and other exemptions, are not affected by the new protocols.